Speaker's Journal

Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert is blogging, and when you have a blog, it’s cool to be informal and use the short version of your name. Such is the case with Speaker’s Journal, written by the newly hip ‘Denny’ Hastert. His first entry is up:

This is Denny Hastert and welcome to my blog. This is new to me. I can’t say I’m much of a techie. I guess you could say my office is teaching the old guy new tricks. But I’m excited. This is the future. And it is a new way for us to get our message out.

Most of you know me as a coach by nature so I hope this gives you some inside access to the Republican playbook.

The internet is changing the way we share information. My office has been talking a lot about some of the conversations going on in blogosphere. So I thought, hey, I should start one and give you unfiltered updates on Capitol Hill.

Hopefully, this is the real deal and not some staffer who’s ghost writing. On the surface, it looks legit, so I’ll assume Denny is really typing. And while I think having “inside access to the Republican playbook” would be a great thing, I seriously doubt we’ll receive that from ‘Coach’ Hastert. But I’ll give him points for dangling the carrot in his first post. Hey, he wants us to come back and be regular readers right? The real test will be to see if Denny blogs every day, or just once in a while. If it’s the latter, this won’t be a real blog, but a place to archive talking points, speeches and press statements. But far be it from me to prejudge the speaker. Oh, and I should note that he doesn’t provide a comments section. That’s a pity. He’d be way out front in my book if he received feedback from readers. That’d be the kind of access I’d come back for.

So, here’s your first link from me Denny. I hope I have reason to link a lot more often.